Look at the picture above. Now pretend it’s your rearview mirror. That giant set of batwings is right behind you and gaining; now it pulls into the fast lane. A couple of teenagers grin as they zip by you ass-backwards at seventy miles an hour. The front grille of the ’59 Chevy slowly recedes in the distance ahead. If you spent any time on the roads of Cincinnati around 1969, this may well have happened to you.
Go to any auto auction. Chances are you’ll see 2001 Accords and Camrys go for higher prices than 2003 Tauruses and Grand Prixs. Is that premium justified? Well, I’ll put it to you this way.
John writes:
My mom’s 2001 Protégé lx 2.0 automatic was nice when new, 15″ aluminum rims, nice motor, sunroof, etc. Now at 98,000 New Hampshire miles, shipwreck rusty underneath from salt, it needs new suspension. Soup to nuts.
It has horrible rattles from loose suspension fittings, and it floats like a boat, soaring and zooming with mind of its own over gentle rises. Needs new OEM springs, shocks, all bearings and bushings. All local shops say it’s not worth it. Don’t even want to provide a quote. Is it worth it to spend about $1,500- 2,000 on all new suspension? What if it weren’t rusty? What if I did labor with my weekends and spent $800 at Napa for everything new?
Really what I am asking is why do cars wear to point where not fixing, suspension wise? Is it really a throw away car?
Netherlands — Dutch lumber merchant Martin Robben no longer believes the camera never lies. As reported by De Telegraaf, the man was falsely accused of speeding forty-five times on August 25 while his vehicle, a commercial truck, was parked on the side of the road in Oldeberkoop village. “Sometimes there were only three seconds between the tickets,” Robben told the Dutch paper. “That’s impossible . . . Nobody can be flashed dozens of times in an afternoon.” As is the common practice in Europe, tickets sent in the mail do not include photographs of the alleged offense, just a demand for payment. In Robben’s case, the demand amounted to thousands of euros, which forced him to retain the law firm of Anker and Anker to help him prove his own innocence. Defendants must make a special request to see the evidence against them. The Netherlands is home to Gatsometer, the top manufacturer of speed cameras worldwide. The same device that falsely accused Robben is currently used in a number of US cities, including Silver Spring, Maryland. Speed cameras around the world have accused stationary vehicles of speeding, as documented in Australia as well as France and the UK.
[Courtesy of thenewspaper.com]
All right, all you expert sleuths of vintage chrome moldings and extruded textures. I will once again try to stump you and will undoubtedly fail. I apologize for the lack of resolution, but it’s a small crop. And you’re too good. A shout out to last week’s winner, 6c1500, who nailed the stick-shift Caddy early on.
We will only do a hybrid if that is what is required to maintain the vehicle. I think we have a pretty good plan right now that probably will not require a hybrid in the near term . . . I don’t believe that we need to do a six-cylinder engine in a Corvette at this time.
GM’s Tom Stephens, promising Automotive News [sub] that new efficiency standards won’t tame Chevy’s little red love machine. Incidentally, GM has already developed a hybrid ‘vette. In theory.
This morning’s New York Times had a jarring headline: “A Proposed Tax on the Cadillac Health Insurance Plans May Also Hit the Chevys.” I swear I thought they meant The Gray Lady was referring to a tax on Cadillac workers’ health care plan. To these admittedly jaundiced eyes (ew), “Hit the Chevys” sounds like something a GMC executive does when sales slide. “Hey, what’s wrong with Joe? Same as it ever was. Hitting the Chevys again? Yup.” Anyway, I can’t remember the last time I heard the phrase “The Cadillac of . . .” (Longtime readers may recall that I made this observation previously when the installation guy referred to my new KitchenAid as “The Lexus of dishwashers.”) When was the last time you heard the Cadillac comparison, and to what did it refer? What, if anything, has replaced it? Meanwhile, if Buick is “The Class of World Class” where does that leave Cadillac? I think the Beatles did a song about that.
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled last Thursday that police officers need to obtain a warrant before using a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) device to track a motorist. The ruling was handed down in the case of Everett H. Connolly who was convicted of cocaine trafficking after police traced his activities using a GPS device five years ago.For more than a year, police suspected that Connolly was a drug dealer and used traditional surveillance and investigative techniques to gather evidence. On August 30, 2004, state police took the next step by obtaining a warrant to place a GPS tracker on Connolly’s minivan. Using data from the device, police believed Connolly was on his way back from a drug buy in New York. On September 9, officers armed with a new search warrant arrested Connolly in Cape Cod. A search uncovered 124 grams of cocaine hidden in the vehicle.
If you go on advertising alone, it’s easy to think every 2010 Ford Taurus is an EcoBoosted, twin-turbo wonder. And while the SHO dominates public perception of the new Taurus, its $37,170 base price is a good reminder that SHO-boaters will be paying halo model money to get what the TV ads are dangling in America’s face. But as new Tauruses once again become part of the automotive landscape, another reality is bound to hit intrigued observers: it’s damn hard to tell a $37k+ SHO from a $25k+ SE model. Car and Driver claims that’s because Ford’s clinics revealed “there was no consensus on the level of pizazz the SHO should wield,” so they went with a sleeper. Or, “the cautious side of conservative,” to borrow a phrase. And then they changed their minds.
From wreckedexotics.com:
This Mercedes SLR was purchased only a day before this accident. The 23 year old son of the owner borrowed the car and managed to crash it into 3 other cars.
Details are a bit sketchy, but reports say he had a young child in the passenger seat who was slightly injured. The driver left the scene of the accident and reported back 17 hours later. He said he had to leave the scene to take the child to the hospital.
The SLR was allegedly racing a Ferrari 599 GTB at the time of the accident. The car cost about $700,000.
Location:
Warsaw, Poland
TTAC’s call for Chrysler to reveal what the hell it plans on doing with U.S. taxpayers’ $10 billion “investment” has been answered. According to Automotive News [sub], a plan for Chrysler’s product line-up is “emerging” ahead of the official reveal in . . . November. That said, calling so-called plan “vague” would like be calling Hillary Clinton’s tome “It Takes a Village” slightly left-leaning and insufficiently attributed. Anyway, here ya go: “A Chrysler brand with more luxury than Cadillac. A Dodge brand known for driving dynamics. A Jeep lineup that is — well, Jeep. And vehicles to cover every market segment so that wildly fluctuating fuel prices won’t destroy sales.” Sounds crazy and it’ll never work.
TTAC’s analyst extraordinaire, Ronnie Schreiber writes:
My daughter has a Volvo 940. The local Volvo mechanic said that the noise it’s making is the #1 piston hitting the head because of a sloppy big end bearing, which explains the low oil pressure at idle. I was thinking that 60 or 70 years ago, a mechanic might have fixed just the bad bearing, without rebuilding the engine. I was thinking just to do a quick fix, I could drop the oil pan, take off the offending rod cap, mic the crankshaft journal, buy the best fitting bearing per the crank measurement, and bolt everything together with the new bearing. So, Sajeev, with this true piston slap question, is it worth it to try a cheap engine repair like this?
Scanning the autoblogosphere, I did a figurative double-take on Autoblog’s headline: 2010 Detroit Auto Show main floor is full, recession officially OVER. Since when does Autoblog do irony? Since never, apparently. Here’s the genesis . . . After a disastrous 2009, where major manufacturers pulled out of the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) like a recently divorced billionaire riding bareback, the event’s organizers are fighting for their employer’s survival. Like any marketeer steeped in the ways of Motown, they’re going on all-out with their primary weapon: lies. I mean, baseless hype. Kool-Aid anyone? First to drink: the Detroit Free Press. “‘Every space on the main floor is full,’ a marked departure from the gaps that dotted Cobo’s display space this year because of the disappearance of brands including Nissan, Infiniti, Mitsubishi and Suzuki, show chairman Doug Fox said in an interview at the Frankfurt auto show. Fox declined to name any brands that could return because negotiations are ongoing. One leading possibility might be Porsche. The German sports car specialist abandoned the NAIAS for the Los Angeles auto show a few years ago but has been disappointed that its events in L.A. generate less global news media coverage than it received from Detroit.” That doesn’t sound smell like victory in the morning to me. A full main floor—at what price? How many carmakers? In fact, I smell something else. Not Autoblog though.
The UAW’s Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association funds were originally negotiated with each of the Detroit automakers, creating three separate funds to handle obligations for each of the OEM’s unionized workforces. But the turmoil of the bailout has left the VEBA funds gasping for cash. With the manufacturers unable to meet their VEBA obligations in cash, the union was forced to take significant stakes in GM and Chrysler instead. Now, the WSJ reports that the three VEBA funds will be unified into a single administrative body. Each automaker will have a separate account within the overall VEBA structure, but the unification should help keep down administrative costs. Still, the fact that significant amounts of Chrysler and GM equity will be held by the same body raises some important concerns.
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